1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a personal configuration information sharing system.
2. Description of Related Art
When the setting, the change, the deletion and the like (hereinafter referred to as “setting and the like”) of the same configuration information are performed to a plurality of pieces of electric equipment, management apparatus capable of performing the setting and the like simultaneously to the plurality of pieces of electric equipment through, for example, a network were proposed in the past (see, for example, Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-099949 and Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2000-194630).
Moreover, as for the networks and the management apparatus, a management apparatus capable of keeping a normal communication state always by monitoring the information pertaining to the operational management of a network periodically was proposed (see, for example, Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-234963), and a management apparatus capable of controlling pieces of electric equipment in a plurality of networks by managing the networks in a composite network environment in which the networks can perform bidirectional communications with one another was also proposed (see, for example, Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-209145).
Now, for example, when one piece of electric equipment among a plurality of pieces of electric equipment is portable electric equipment (for example, a portable telephone or the like) and the other pieces of electric equipment is stationary electric equipment (for example, a television broadcast receiver or the like) and the portable electric equipment and the stationary electric equipment have the same function (for example, a television broadcast reception function or the like), it is supposed that the owner of the portable electric equipment and the stationary electric equipment, for example, set a piece of configuration information a in the stationary electric equipment when at home and the owner went out after that to change the configuration information a set in the portable electric equipment to configuration information b. In this case, it can be said that the configuration information b set most recently is the configuration information desired by the owner. However, if the owner wants to set the configuration information b set in the portable electric equipment into the stationary electric equipment, the owner need to set the configuration information b into the stationary electric equipment again. Thus, there is the problem of troublesomeness in this case.
Because each of the management apparatus disclosed in Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-099949 and Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2000-194630 simultaneously sets configuration information in the plurality of pieces of electric equipment, it is impossible to set the configuration information into, for example, a piece of electric equipment that was not connected to the network at the time of setting the configuration information. Accordingly, it is needed to set the configuration information again into the electric equipment that was not connected to the network. Moreover, Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-234963 and Japanese patent application publication laid-open No. 2005-209145 do not disclose anything about the sharing of configuration information at all, and the patent publications do not contribute to the settlement of the problem mentioned above at all.